No Child of Mine (53 page)

Alex immediately liked Sarah, whose rosy face was as round as it was smiley. ‘Hello my darling,’ she said affectionately. ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to us that we’re being able to greet you like this. Knowing your mum for as long as I have, I can tell you it’s all she’s ever dreamt of, being with you again one day, and Bob told me on the phone last night how happy she is. It lights me up just to hear it; to meet you would be even better. Come soon, angel, you have a family here just waiting to get to know you.’

‘Lady,’ Ottilie said, pointing at the screen.

‘A lovely lady,’ Anna told her softly.

Ottilie turned to look at her and broke into the sweetest little laugh.

Touched by how much she seemed to be enjoying herself, Alex hugged her again and swallowed a lump that had lodged in her throat as she looked back at the screen. Katie, Rick’s fiancée and Sarah’s niece, was in shot now. She was
very slim with boyishly cut white-blonde hair, large brown eyes and a smile that, to Alex’s mind, didn’t quite seem to reach them.

‘Hi Charlotte,’ she said, waving an airy hand. ‘Really good that Anna’s found you. Everyone’s talking about it and hoping you’ll come soon. It’ll definitely be a change for you from Blighty, so be prepared. I love it here myself and wouldn’t ever go back.’

Realising she was speaking with an English accent, Alex said, ‘How long has she lived over there?’

‘About ten years, I think,’ Anna replied. ‘She turned up with a friend during a gap year, fell in love with the place, and stayed.’

‘So how long have she and Rick been together?’

‘Mm, eighteen months? Obviously they’ve known each other a lot longer, with our two families being so close, but they were involved with other people until a couple of years ago. Ah, here’s Shelley’s husband Phil, with the kids.’

Hearing the pride and affection in her mother’s voice, Alex turned to the screen as Anna’s step-grandchildren spoke in unison saying, ‘Hi Charlotte, welcome to New Zealand. We’re really looking forward to meeting you.’ They grinned. ‘I’m Danni, and I’m ten,’ the lithe little blonde bombshell informed her. ‘I’m Craig and I’m eight,’ her curly-haired brother added.

‘And I’m Phil and I’m thirty-eight,’ their father quipped. ‘Hi Charlotte. Welcome. They do a mean barbie in this house, so you need to get yourself over here.’

‘Do you water-ski?’ Danni asked.

‘We do,’ Craig told Alex.

At that up came a sequence showing both children whizzing round the bay on their skis, with Phil driving one boat and Rick the other. In voice-over, Danni said, ‘We usually do this every day after school. It’s one of our favourite sports, but Craig’s really good at rugger too and I’m into dancing. I also love my horse, Diesel. If you come I’ll take you out for a ride on him. He’s very gentle.’

‘And I’ll teach you to dive if you like,’ Craig chipped in, ‘I mean if you don’t already know how to do it. Mum said
you might, because you live by the sea, but it’s a lot colder over there so you might not.’

‘Look,’ Anna whispered and nodded towards Ottilie, whose eyes were like saucers as she watched the children cutting wild swathes through the water.

‘Look,’ Ottilie whispered to Boots, and held him up.

Stifling their laughs, Alex and Anna returned to the screen as the images changed to some kind of county fair and Bob said, ‘I’m going to finish up with some additional flavour of our wonderful North Island. What you’re seeing here is some footage of last year’s Waimate Show, beginning with our very own Danni on Diesel. There she goes clearing the final jump, and now here she is picking up yet another prizewinner’s cup. Now we have Craig parading one of the prizewinning lambs, and a real beauty she was too. Aha, here are a couple of babes on the dodgems, big kids the pair of them.’ Alex laughed when she realised it was Anna and Sarah. ‘Ooh! That looked nasty,’ Bob gulped, as someone rammed their car into them. ‘NZ’s answer to road rage. Here we have a few of the sideshows for those of us who like to win big.’

Alex laughed again as Bob himself held up a sorry-looking plastic toy.

‘Woof,’ Ottilie said.

‘That’s right, it’s a dog,’ Alex told her.

‘And of course no little taster of our wonderful country would be complete without showing you the All Blacks nailing the World Cup and touring it round town.’

By the time the sounds of cheering crowds faded into silence and the video was over, Alex felt so caught up in the world she’d been watching that it almost came as a shock to find herself in the Vicarage, with its tightly shut windows and dismal grey skies outside. She glanced at her mother and could so easily see her amongst her family in the video. She belonged there, far more than she did in this dingy, old-fashioned kitchen that had never seen a lobster or hosted the making of macadamia butter in its entire life.

Noticing that Ottilie had dropped off in her lap, she rose carefully from the chair with her cheek resting against
Ottilie’s head and began to rock her back and forth as Anna shut down the computer. Then, realising her mother was waiting for a response, she smiled as she said, ‘It looks wonderful, nothing at all like I was expecting. I can understand why you’re so happy there.’

Anna’s smile seemed both knowing and troubled as she dropped her eyes to Ottilie and smoothed a finger over her cheek. ‘I suppose it’s time to take her home,’ she said quietly.

Alex nodded, and making sure Boots was tucked safely into Ottilie’s bag, she carried them out to the car. What was wrenching at her heart more than anything, she realised, was the guilt of knowing that the future, whatever it contained, was looking so much better for her than it was for Ottilie.

Alex and Anna spent that weekend viewing flats, most of which made Alex’s head spin simply to walk through the door. She’d never dreamt of being able to live in such luxury. It was on the first floor of a glossy white Georgian town house with not one, but two bright and airy bedrooms, a newly fitted high-quality kitchen and a seriously grand, part-furnished sitting room with French windows on to balconies that looked straight out to sea, that Anna came to a decision. When an embarrassed Alex tried to point out that it was way beyond her means and that they really should go now, it appeared her mother wasn’t listening. She declared the flat to be perfect, and ignoring the shock and protest on Alex’s face she informed the agent that she’d bring a banker’s draft to his office on Monday morning to cover the deposit and six months’ rent starting November 1st.

‘We’d also like to take an option on a further six months,’ she added decisively. ‘Just in case,’ she informed Alex as they left, ‘you think I’m trying to pressure you into moving to New Zealand by Easter.’

Having no idea how on earth she’d manage to pay the rent when the first six months were up, Alex decided simply to go with the flow for now and worry about it when the
time came. After all, she’d have a second bedroom she could let out, so there was one answer already.

With the apartment sorted it was time, Anna declared, to indulge her long-forgotten, but suddenly resurgent passion for shopping. Since it wasn’t a national hobby in New Zealand the way it was in England, she explained, she was determined to make the most of it while she was here.

Alex found it breathtaking to watch how much it thrilled her mother to spend, spend, spend, like she was a millionaire. Apart from the crazy number of presents she bought for everyone back home, she kept piling Alex up with more clothes, shoes, jewellery and make-up than Alex would ever know what to do with. She even offered to buy gifts for Ottilie, but Alex cautioned against it – she had no idea how Brian Wade would react, but she really didn’t think he’d approve.

After exhausting themselves at the mall, they then rounded the weekend off with a dinner for Tommy and his wife Jackie, a large, energetic woman with vibrantly dyed red hair and as warm a heart as Tommy’s. They arrived at the Vicarage bearing two bottles of Cloudy Bay that made Anna swoon with delight, and four albums of their own memorable two months in New Zealand, thirteen years ago.

In no time at all they were chatting away about the many different places in the world they’d visited, making Alex realise, with some embarrassment, that she really needed to get out more. She was enjoying listening though, since it was offering her an even greater insight into her mother, and not only her, but the man who she, Alex, might one day get used to thinking of as her stepfather. Though that particular title often rang warning bells for someone in her position, finding that she had one of her own who seemed to be a model version of the species – gentle, humorous, not to mention extremely generous – was every bit as intriguing as the prospect of one day going to visit him.

It was towards the end of the evening that the conversation, almost inevitably, turned to Ottilie as Tommy asked how she was.

‘Much the same as usual,’ Alex replied, with a quick glance at her mother. She hoped Anna wasn’t going to mention anything about her being too close to Ottilie, or it could end up ruining a lovely evening. ‘The medical assessments can’t happen soon enough though,’ she added, ‘for both her and her mother.’

‘What about the child’s inflammation?’ Tommy prompted.

‘I checked her myself when we were at nursery on Friday,’ Alex said, ‘and it’s pretty well cleared up.’

‘So could it have been whatever the doctor called it?’ Jackie asked.

‘Vulvovaginitis,’ Alex provided, interested to realise that Tommy had told his wife about Ottilie. ‘Yes, it could, in fact I’d prefer to think that it was, because the alternative is somewhere we really don’t want to go.’

Jackie’s expression was grim as she glanced at Anna and shook her head in dismay. ‘You just never know where bad things are going to happen, do you?’ she sighed. ‘And to think of what that bloke does for a living. He’s with kids all the time, so it makes you wonder if any of them are safe.’

‘To be honest, it’s about the only thing that’s helping me to trust him,’ Alex told her. ‘If anything was going on at the school something would surely have come to light by now, if not through one of the parents, then one of the teachers.’

‘It reminds me of a case, years ago,’ Tommy said, picking up his wine. ‘It was a chap who drove buses for kids with special needs. A kinder, gentler soul you never wished to meet; he’d do anything for anyone, went out of his way to make sure his passengers were properly taken care of, even used to remember their birthdays. Turned out he had a little boy at home, Euan his name was, eight years old, and what that animal had been doing to his own son ...’

Anna shuddered. ‘Why do you say it reminds you of Ottilie?’ she asked worriedly.

‘I suppose because he worked with kids, and it took us over a year to get any evidence of what was actually going on with the boy. We suspected it after an incident at school brought him to our attention, but delivering actual proof,
or enough to persuade the courts that he was in danger, turned out to be next to impossible.’

‘What about the boy’s mother?’ Jackie protested. ‘Didn’t she know what was going on?’

Tommy shook his head sadly. ‘Even if she did, poor woman probably didn’t understand. She had the mental age of a ten-year-old and though she loved her son, she had no more idea of what it meant to be a mother than she did of what it was to be a right-thinking person.’

‘So what happened to the little boy in the end?’ Alex dared to ask.

Looking as though he wished he hadn’t started the story now, Tommy said, ‘I want to tell you he was taken into care, but I’m afraid he was taken to the graveyard. The father killed him, I suppose to stop him from talking, then he went to the police and confessed.’

Alex’s face had turned white.

‘It’s not going to happen here,’ Tommy assured her. ‘We’ve got the paediatrician’s report coming this week, and the psych on the mother ...’

‘Yeah, what about Ottilie’s mother?’ Jackie came in. ‘Where’s she in all of this?’

Alex sighed. ‘It’s a very good question, but all I can tell you is that it never seems to be on this planet. It might be helpful if I could find out what sort of medication she’s on, because I swear she’s drugged out of her mind half the time. Her doctor admits to prescribing sleeping tablets, but as you can get just about anything online these days, I have to wonder if she’s self-prescribing.’

As they sat with the bleakness of that, Jackie turned to Anna and said, ‘I don’t expect you imagined being caught up in anything like this when you came to find your daughter.’

Anna’s smile was weak. ‘Not really, no,’ she admitted, ‘but what matters is that I support her in any way I can.’

Alex glanced at her gratefully as Jackie nodded.

‘She’s going to miss you when you’ve gone back,’ Jackie commented. ‘How much longer are you staying?’

‘Until the weekend,’ Anna replied, looking at Alex. ‘Then we’re hoping she’ll come to us for Christmas.’

Not wanting to think about the parting, or to say anything to disappoint her mother, since a lot could happen between now and then, Alex simply smiled as though she was keen on the idea of the visit, which under other circumstances she might have been, and got up to make some coffee.

What’s going to happen to you, Ottilie?
she was thinking, as she gazed at the odd-looking picture pinned to the fridge. It was one Ottilie had done a few days ago, at nursery, when Janet had asked the children to draw an animal that scared them. Most had come up with various forms of jagged teeth, or claws, saying they were lions or tigers, or savage dogs, but Ottilie had simply drawn a line then scribbled all over it. When Alex had asked her what it was, she’d pushed it away and hidden behind Boots.

If only she could persuade Ottilie to talk a little more, she might be able to get some idea of what was going on, not only in her mind, but in that wretchedly dismal house on the hill.

‘I’m going to give Ottilie her bath now,’ Brian Wade informed his wife. ‘Do we still have the cream the doctor gave us for her inflammation?’

Erica was staring at the night-black window. The big yellow eye had been watching her for over an hour, the entire time Brian had been inside it with Ottilie. It had stopped now; even the afterglow was fading.